If you’ve been thinking of taking up cycling but keep putting it off, or you’re one of the 25% who never quite get round to replacing a stolen bike, now is the time to act. Just think of the months of sunlit roads that lie ahead of you. Consider the muscles you will have toned, the lard you will have shed, the pounds you will have saved by the time the holiday season arrives.
OK, it’s going to take more than that to convince you, so let’s divide getting on a bike into incentives and disincentives.
In my experience, the most frequent excuse for not cycling is the unpredictability of the weather. So I kept a diary for the whole of March and the results were surprising, even to me. This, after all, is the month that Flanders and Swann berated in their Weather Song for its “wintry wind/Would thou wer’t not so unkind”.
I normally make two cycle journeys a day, six days a week, which added up to a potential total of 52 journeys over the month of March. I was ill for four days, so I actually made 44 journeys. I certainly remember some wintry winds, and admittedly I was tucked up in bed with a hot water bottle when the worst of the March storms were strafing the country. All the same, according to my diary it rained (or snowed) on just six of my journeys, which is 13.6% of the time. On only two occasions was the weather so miserable that I abandoned my bike altogether.
“But,” you may protest, “we’re into April now, with its ‘sweet spring showers – on and on for hours and hours’.” But even days that appear to be wet usually have dry patches in them, and as a cyclist – especially if there is any flexibility in your day – you’re going to get more fair weather than you imagine from the forecasts.
Add to this the fact that, if you’re actually out in it, rather than watching through the steamed-up windows of a car or a bus, rain isn’t a single condition – it ranges from incapacitating deluge to a fine drizzle that is almost pleasurable if you’re trying to get somewhere fast.
But this all sounds too hearty by half, so what are the incentives? The biggest one for the city dweller has to be the ability to calculate travelling time accurately.
My ride to work takes about 22 minutes, regardless of road closures, temporary traffic lights and rush-hour jams. To be sure of making the same journey by bus I have to allow an hour. It doesn’t always take that long but, what with the waiting and the traffic, I can never assume that it won’t. On one memorable occasion, when I was late for the theatre, a bus driver simply announced that he was stopping for a rest because he was 15 minutes early, but nobody could get off as we were between stops. It was that experience that persuaded me to overcome my fear of cycling in the West End: the stress of watching all those cyclists whizzing past while trapped in a tin can of mutinous sardines was clearly going to be infinitely more life-threatening in the long term.
There are more tangible incentives on offer, if you only know where to look. If you’re hoping to defray the cost of buying a bike, it’s worth investigating Cyclescheme (cyclescheme.co.uk), which is an initiative to provide tax-free bicycles for employees. Like the old Home Computing Initiative, it involves employers buying the bike and loaning it to staff for a monthly sum deducted from their salary. The snags are that you have to get your boss involved, and you’re not eligible if you are self-employed. At the end of the 12-month loan period, you can buy the bike for its second-hand value which, CycleScheme says, is generally around 5% of the original price.
There are also a growing number of local authorities that are prepared to support cycling with hard cash. Islington council, in north London, recently decided to offer £100 to residents who surrendered their parking permit. A handful of employers also now offer mileage payments to cyclists, with some hospital trusts paying up to 50p a mile.
What if you’ve got a bike but you’re not confident about using it? In some London boroughs and some cities, such as Cardiff, children and adults are offered free cycle training. Roger Geffen, campaign and policy manager at the national cyclists’ organisation CTC, says: “These can be very effective because they help people to get over the barrier of worrying about the dangers of cycling in traffic. If you show them how to ride in traffic safely and confidently, so that the traffic respects their right to be there, people will begin to make longer journeys.”
Really, there’s never been a better time to take to your bike. Put it off and, as Flanders and Swann would tell you, it’ll only be “bloody January again”.
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